Human rights and development activists have been urged by former president Mary Robinson to make the right to proper healthcare a central issue in their campaigns.
"Health has to be seen as a human right pertaining to the individual," she said yesterday at a TCD conference on "Ireland and Global Development".
She added: "A nation's health system is its life force."
Recalling her experiences as president and UN high commissioner for human rights, she described witnessing a child dying of hunger in Somalia. It was one of the 30,000 preventable deaths of children under five years of age which took place every day in a "silent tsunami".
Infectious diseases were "ravaging the developing world". Describing the statistics for deaths in the HIV/Aids pandemic as "mind-boggling", she said that they haunted our sense of human justice. Eight thousand people died in the pandemic every day, "nearly three times the death toll of 9/11".
The human, social, economic and security fallout from this was "almost unthinkable". But she added that the recent special session of the UN on HIV/Aids was "deeply disappointing".
Several countries - "sadly including the US" - had taken a stance based on ideology and had refused to accept the special situation of vulnerable groups such as "sex workers" and homosexuals as well as the case for providing clean needles to drug addicts.
The Aids pandemic showed the need for a new approach. It was "more than a virus" but rather a "clarion call for a paradigm change".
On the issue of migration, she described a visit to Ghana earlier this year, where she saw how the departure of health workers from that country meant there was a "completely inadequate" number of medical personnel left behind.There were 600 Ghanaian doctors in New York and fewer than 3,000 back home, which was one-third of the minimum number required by a country that size.
UN Special Representative on Migration and former European commissioner Peter Sutherland told the conference that 8.1 per cent of the workforce in Ireland had originated abroad, adding that, to date, this phenomenon had been handled "rather well".